Minting involves the process of imprinting precious metals, base metals, and other metals or metal alloys with lettering, images, etc. Traditionally, the metal minting industry has minted or otherwise marked large quantities of products in large lots as it has traditionally been the only cost effective way of producing minted metal due to the high costs of image designs, artwork, hand-design plaster sculpting and engraving, die work, die tooling, manufacturing, stamping, and pressing methods. In particular, the traditional manner of stamping metal is not only costly due to the inherent high expense of materials, but time consuming due to the manufacturing methods used.
The high costs and capital expenditure that is necessary in the traditional stamping methods limits the number of products that can be created, ties up valuable capital with no certainty of selling the products or inventory, prevents the launch of newer and better selling products, precludes the possible revision of the older products, and burdens the publisher, manufacturer or retailer with expensive inventory, storage and insurance costs. In short, the traditional methods put large amounts of capital at risk with no guarantee that the product will sell out to completion, leaving large quantities of unsold inventory and wasted capital.
There is, thus, a need for an on-demand metal minting system and method for minting metal when ordered, when needed, at low costs and only the quantity desired. The proposed system and method will provide a database of selectable data and/or media including size, shape, purities, and weight of certain metal pieces and, in some embodiments, allow the user to select or otherwise input desired text, images, or other decorative elements to be minted onto a selected metal piece. The system will utilize digital printing technology to mint the customized metal pieces with selected, designated, or custom decorative elements, on-demand, meaning as ordered in quantities as few as one, rather than minting excessively large quantities using the traditional, expensive and slow time to market methods. The new, proposed system and method need not preorder or manufacture expensive metal dies or stamps, and instead implements certain digital printing techniques by utilizing devices such as UV printers, UV curable inks, digital printers, digital photo printers, card printers, lasers, markers, engravers, 3-D printers, etchers, and pressure sensitive film printing, which offer high quality image production for imprinted products and allow on-demand production of minted metal pieces.
In certain embodiments, it would also be advantageous to implement the on-demand production of a housing to contain or otherwise combine with the minted metal piece. The housing can be printed, cut, sized, or otherwise customized in any manner on-demand and combined with the customized minted metal piece to produce a minted metal assembly. The housing may be in the form of virtually any encasing, container or wrapping, including, but certainly not limited to a credit card shaped and sized apparatus.
In particular, the proposed on-demand minting system and method allows the manufacturer, producer, or seller to maintain a virtual inventory or database of products, allowing for a larger number of available metals, designs, products, shapes, sizes, purities, etc. that would not be possible using traditional minting or stamping methods. The on-demand system and method allows for a “one-off” minting which permits products to be imprinted or minted on demand for personalization or for manufacturing scarce collectables.
The proposed system and method further provides a much quicker time to market, eliminating the time consuming steps of design, artwork, hand-designed plaster sculpting and engraving, die work, die tooling, manufacturing, stamping and pressing methods. It should also be noted that the proposed on-demand minting system and method would also eliminate costly storage expenses, as products are prepared and minted as needed or as ordered.
Furthermore, the system and method may be used to easily and cost-effectively incrementally fulfill limited minting of products to maximize the collectable value. Moreover, if a product is limited to a strict collectable mintage of only 500 pieces, for example, the proposed on-demand system and method will make it easy and possible to manufacture and sell them one at a time or in small quantities. Accordingly, rather than tying up an investment minting all 500 pieces at once, a publisher could easily launch multiple product offerings, on-demand.